1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a system for information technology (IT) asset location, monitoring, identification, and security. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system for location and identification of equipment in data center equipment racks, and for providing monitoring and security for the equipment.
2. Related Art
A data center is generally located in a high-tech building that is designed to run and operate large numbers of servers, computers and communication equipment. Data Centers are an essential element in the Internet and IT infrastructure of large organizations. There are thousands of data centers around the world, and an important component of any data center are the equipment racks that house the data center equipment, including servers, computers and communication equipment. A typical equipment rack can hold 40 to 50 standard sized servers or other pieces of equipment. FIG. 1 shows such an equipment rack (ER) 150 that carries a number of pieces of equipment rack equipment (ERE) 108. A large data center can have thousands of these ER 150s containing many thousands of servers and other ERE 108, each of which cost several thousand dollars on average and may contain highly confidential or proprietary data. The data center's management must be able to locate, identify and secure their equipment in order to meet their operational, financial and regulatory compliance requirements.
Conventionally, in order to count and locate equipment, data center managers use one of the three options that are described to follow. In each case, a unique IDentification (ID) tag is associated with each piece of equipment to be tracked, and this information is recorded in some way into an inventory database.
A. Manual Option
For the manual option, a person must periodically visit each equipment rack and record its location and the asset ID for each piece of equipment in the equipment rack. This information may be captured by someone's memory, by hand on a clipboard, or in a spreadsheet-type electronic table. For example, in order to uniquely identify equipment that serves a specific function among otherwise physically similar or identical equipment, the data center will typically print a paper label with a human readable asset ID and then affix this paper label to the server or equipment. The human readable paper label becomes the unique identifier that is used to identify the equipment. This approach is error prone, very labor intensive and risky for two reasons. First, the labels tend to fall off, and labels degrade over time. Additionally, the nature of the human interaction involved in creating, printing and affixing asset IDs can lead to some level of naming conflicts whereby the human readable names may be easily duplicated, mislabeled, misread, mis-affixed, and/or misidentified. Second, asset ID labels can identify a piece of equipment only if a technician can actually physically locate the piece of equipment. In order to locate the equipment, it is necessary to keep track of where a piece of equipment with a certain asset ID label is located. Typically, the data center will use some kind of inventory records and try to keep these records up to date. However, tracking and keeping current inventory records for equipment that is added, moved, and/or replaced on a continuous basis is very labor intensive and error prone. With this option, there is a serious risk that the technician will work on, reconfigure, move or replace the wrong piece of equipment and cause significant, additional problems.
The manual process may be enhanced by placing barcodes on the asset ID labels and using portable barcode readers to read the asset ID off the barcode. Later, the collected information is saved from the barcode reader into an electronic database. If the location is recorded as well, then the electronic database can be accessed to provide location information about the equipment at the time the barcode was read. With barcodes, it is easier to avoid the naming conflicts mentioned above because labels are machine read and the level of human interaction is one step removed from these activities. However, the other manual process issues remain and the problems with this barcode version of the manual option is that it is labor intensive, error prone, time consuming, costly to implement, requires specialized equipment, and the data collected represents only a single point in time. Because the barcode data reads represent a single point in time, from the moment the information is gathered, its accuracy is immediately degraded and out-of-date because data center operators move, repair and replace equipment regularly. Consequently, data centers typically have trouble keeping a manual database accurate and up to date.
B. Passive RFID Option
Passive RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) tags have been used to track and identify IT assets for about a decade. Passive tags do not contain a power supply, but rely instead on harvesting power from a passive RFID reader in order to transmit a signal. With this option, passive RFID tags are placed on equipment in an equipment rack, and periodically, a person will visit each equipment rack and use a passive RFID reader to read the passive RFID tags on the equipment and record the location. Many vendors offer passive RFID tags and readers. Using a passive RFID tag reader is similar to using the Manual Option with a barcode reader; i.e., in both cases, a person operating the readers must be within close physical proximity and line of sight with the barcode or RFID tag. An RFID reader, however, offers advantages over a barcode reader as the RFID tag's radio wave can be read from odd angles, as compared to a barcode reader's infrared beam that has to be aligned with the line of bars of the barcode. Additionally, many RFID tags can be read from a distance of several feet, as compared to a read distance of only a few inches for a barcode tag. However, the passive RFID Option has many of the same drawbacks as the Manual Option: it is labor intensive, error prone and it represents single point-in-time information that erodes quickly and lacks accuracy as data center equipment is moved or replaced.
C. Active RFID Option
Active RFID tags have emerged as the next generation of RFID tags to track equipment, including IT equipment, and provide an improvement over passive RFID tags. The company “RF Code” is a vendor that currently offers an active RFID system used to track equipment in data centers. Active RFID tags have an on-board power supply, which gives them the ability to periodically transmit a radio signal to an RFID reader without being powered or prompted to do so by the reader. Powered by their on-board power supply, these tags are operating independent of an RFID reader or other receiving system. When used in production flows and storage facilities, for example container yards, readers are typically installed at entry and exit points of buildings and/or processes to be monitored, typically called “zones”. In data centers, because of the environmental obstacles that metal equipment racks and metal server cabinets represent to radio-wave based communication and because of the need to define the “zone” as accurately as an equipment rack, an RFID antenna and reader is installed on each equipment rack in order to read the active tags placed on each piece of equipment in an equipment rack. Each RFID reader has a unique ID that is associated with a specific equipment rack in a specific location, and this information is saved to a software application database. The active RFID tags on the equipment will periodically transmit their unique ID, and this is received by the RFID antenna and transferred to the reader assigned to the equipment rack. The data received by the RFID reader is then sent to a software application that will associate the reader ID and the RFID tag ID with a location and a piece of equipment.
D. Comparison of Options
Active RFID has the advantage over the Passive RFID option in that it provides real-time location information about each piece of equipment in the equipment rack. However, active RFID tags, readers and antenna installation are very costly. Further, due to the high concentration of metal (in the equipment racks and equipment), signal interference problems result which can cause reduced reliability and stability in reading the active tag signals and complicated installation and maintenance procedures. Also, active RFID tags can only transmit signals and typically cannot receive signals, so their functionality is limited to broadcasting only.
Data centers are increasingly interested in moving away from the Manual Option and will often review the passive RFID Option and to a much lesser extent the active RFID Option. This is evidenced by the adoption of standards by the Financial Services Technology Consortium for passive RFID tags to be used on data center equipment. This standard is gaining momentum and acceptance in data centers in spite of the shortcomings of passive RFID. RFID options are inherently attractive as they provide a reduction in cost of inventory counts and equipment tracking, and, thus, are viewed as good alternatives to manual methods.
A drawback to all of the current options is the lack of ability to locate equipment even if it is identifiable by either a manual label or an RFID tag. People operating and monitoring the data center equipment are often not in the same physical location as the equipment racks. Consequently, when there is a problem with a piece of equipment, the data center operator will contact a technician who is located in the data center and have the technician go to the equipment rack and work on the problem equipment. The data center operator is looking on a computer screen that identifies the equipment on the electronic network, but this is not linked to a physical location of the equipment. Thus, when the technician arrives at the equipment rack, it is difficult for the technician to identify the specific piece of equipment within the equipment rack that is in need of attention because most often the equipment in the rack is the same or a similar model.
Data centers are further faced with issues of physical security of rack-mounted equipment in the equipment rack. If a data center operator is alerted that a piece of equipment is down, the operator has to undertake a diagnostic process to identify why. Has the power supply failed? Did someone unplug the network cable? Did the equipment overheat? Did someone remove the equipment from the rack? All such physical security related potential issues are complicated to determine and resolve. Therefore, the process of determining why the equipment failed is time consuming and can cause significant delays in getting the equipment back in operation.